Physical rehabilitation has become increasingly important for subjects recovering from treatment in clinics and from disease conditions including stroke. A particularly critical requirement is the support of individuals who suffer from impaired mobility or who may be confined to beds, yet must be provided with an assured fitness promotion regimen.
Stroke is a prominent cause of long-term disability in the United States. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), 800,000 people experience strokes every year. Stroke patients often lose essential sensorimotor skills. Consequently, the main objective of stroke rehabilitation is to re-enable patients' functional skills so they will be able to perform daily tasks. Physical activity, coupled with a regimented program, has been shown to reduce the probability of future strokes and prevent major loss of functional skills. Aerobic exercise has been shown to provide benefits for chronic stroke patients through intervention in both upper and lower extremities, even when the subjects were exercising while sitting. Unfortunately, many stroke survivors suffer from physical deconditioning, which further leads to cardiovascular risk factors and problems. As a result, an immediate solution is needed for stroke patients during rehabilitation. Specifically, physicians need to engage patients in repetitive exercises. With the increasingly prohibitive cost of hospital stay and pressure to discharge patients as soon as possible, a cost-effective solution to stroke rehabilitation is crucial.
Conventional low cost exercise cycle devices provide a means for enabling patient exercise. However, these devices are limited since they do not report energy expenditure that is critical to establishing whether a subject user is meeting a prescribed exercise regimen or has improved or declined. The lack of knowledge of actual workload may result in inadequate or excessive exercise. Conventional low cost exercise cycle devices also do not include the capability for local guidance and remote monitoring. Without these capabilities, it is not possible for a caregiver or healthcare enterprise to monitor all patients to ensure adherence to an exercise protocol.
An urgent need exists for low cost, rapidly deployable systems that enable exercise activity for patients in the clinic, those recovering in the community, the frail elderly, and those disabled.